Bible teacher, pastor and desiringGod.org founder John Piper has hosted a podcast called “Ask Pastor John” for seven years. The format is pretty straightforward: Piper’s team selects an emailed question from a listener, and he attempts to answer them.
This week’s episode featured an, uh, unique, topic: “sexualized dreams”.
In an intro to the text version of the podcast, Piper’s team explains that the topic of sex dreams is “easily one of the most asked about topics in the inbox,” adding, “fourteen hundred episodes later, here we are, finally addressing the topic of sexualized dreams.”
Here we are indeed.
Let’s stop there for a second. Easily one of the most asked about topics?! There is no shame in asking questions of this nature, but is the volume of inquiries surprising to anyone else? Are there really that many people dying to know John Piper’s thoughts on sex dreams? Piper is a (somewhat controversial) theologian and the chancellor of a seminary, and one of the questions he is asked about most is … sex dreams?
Anyway.
The question comes from a 31-year-old believer who wants to know why he’s having “sexual dreams with people other than my wife.”
To his credit, Piper tries his best to use mostly Bible verses about dreams to answer a pretty complex, and kind of awkward, question. So what’s his answer? It’s kind of all over the place.
Piper suggests the dreams could be “Freudian”—in other words, the dreams could be the result of a combination of “sexual hormones, desires, impulses, born of nature.” He also suggests “that God really does use dreams to terrify us with warnings in order to humble our pride and keep us back from sin.”
Piper also gives a few tips for curbing unwanted sex dreams, including to pray for deliverance and to “purge your movie and TV habits of all sexually stimulating content — not just porn, but worldly sexuality.”
You can read and listen to the whole segment here and finally know John Piper’s extended thoughts on sex dreams.
